Iran vs. Israel

“The [Obama administration] wants no part of an Israeli strike… From a technical standpoint, there is no question that Israel could severely damage the Iranian nuclear program… What ripples would ensue from a successful Israeli strike on Iran? Iran probably would attempt to block the Straits of Hormuz… and America would respond by destroying Iranian conventional military capabilities and infrastructure from the air… In the absence of an American leadership willing to assert American strategic interests in the region, Israel well might save the United States. In the long view of things, there is not much cause for optimism about the Muslim world.”

[The author of that article, Reza Kaahlili, is an Iranian (using a pseudonym) who is also a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the author of the award-winning book ‘A Time to Betray.’]

and…

“Mahdi, according to Shiite belief, will reappear at the time of Armageddon.”

“Of course, ‘rational’ can mean different things. If one wants to annihilate Jews, it is rational to build Auschwitz and Treblinka. If one wants to annihilate Israel, dominate the Middle East, and eventually bring the West including the United States to its knees, it is rational to build nuclear weapons, a far-flung navy, and intercontinental ballistic missiles as Iran is doing. It is also rational to realize, and exploit the fact, that one is essentially dealing with the same West that Hitler dealt with in the 1930s — just as weak-kneed, delusive, and eager to be duped.“

“While optimal, 93-percent–enriched ‘bomb grade’ material is not necessary for producing a nuclear bomb. The weapon that devastated Hiroshima was only 80 percent enriched. In fact, bombs can be made out of material with enrichments as low as 6 percent…”

[For those of you who have no idea why that’s both very clever and very funny, you can find outhere . )

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“Iran is running out of people, and it is running out of oil, and it will run out of oil just about when it most needs the revenue to support the retirement of its own ‘baby boom’ of the 1960s and 1970s. That is why Iran has a rational reason to take risks that might seem insane and self-destructive to countries less beset by existential risks.“

“… we are fighting…a secret war against the Tehran regime. A long essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine says just that (while insisting that most of the action is being carried out by Israel’s Mossad, not our spooks).”